Update by user Jan 17, 2014

I complained to Alibaba as I contacted Givoe through them, and they agreed that my dispute was valid and that Givoe should compensate, but Givoe have not. Unfortunately, such rulings by Alibaba are worthless, as all that happens is a mark against the supplier's name for three months (gee wizz).

Original review posted by user Dec 18, 2013

My company is a UK specialist car camera / DVR / accident video camera company. We made the mistake of buying product from Givoe Technology Co Ltd of Hong / Kong / China, who are fully better known as Shenzhen Givoe Technology Co., Ltd. The are a manufacturer of DVR's and GPS but not the way they pretend to be, and are the most unreliable / dishonourable company we have ever dealt with.

We bought the K6000 car camera / dash cam from Givoe. We were guaranteed new product and assured the failure rate was only 2% (in the first year). You need to be aware that Givoe are one of only two “manufacturers” of the K6000 and both use employ same dodgy practices; in short, whoever you buy a K6000 from, this applies to you!

1) When we received the product and started shipping to our customers, we had a rash of complaints, that the fascias we scuffed / scratched, and often that the internal packaging of the boxes was clearly not new. Our customers stated that the items were clearly second hand. We believe some of the items were second hand, while others did not have the protective film on the fascias, which meant they got scuffed as the items went down the production line. Clearly, we were both defrauded by Givoe (in the case of the second hand units) and can state wit5h 100% confidence that Givoe do not quality control their product as they claim, of course.

2) We subsequently learned that Shenzhen Givoe Technology Co., Ltd., while actually manufacturing GPS units, do not manufacture most of their video camera equipment in-house, but rather sub-contact it out to other small assembly line companies in China, companies that absolutely no quality control. Therefore, it is clear, Givoe commit fraud also by claiming they physically manufacture the product when they do not.

3) Besides the scratching issue, we had a staggering 11% out of box failure rate; 11 out of 100 units did not work when they were taken out of the box. Part of the reason is that Givoe lie about the quality of the components inside the K6000. For example, they claimed that they used a Novatek printed circuit board; they do not, they use a cheap and badly made circuit board. The failure rate increased to 17% overall during the first 2 weeks of use; this is critical because this marks the statutory refund limit, so we have a lot of returns, and had to make a lot of refunds. We lost the shipping cost to our affected customers, we had to reimburse their postage costs back to us, plus we had a mountain of useless / inoperative stock alongside a mountain of returned units because of the scratching problem.

4) 4 Months after we bought the K6000 from Givoe, and the failure rate has climbed to 26%.

5) 52% of the K6000 units we bought from Givoe ended up being returned. Because of this, we have actually made a huge overall loss on this product, not least because of all the lost shipping costs and reimbursed returned costs. We also have two mountains of useless Givoe K6000 car cameras. Plus our comnpany reputation has suffered tremendously.

6) When we tried to claim compensation from Givoe, they said we had to return the units to them first, at our own expense. We said we would not do this because the problems came from fraudulently sold second hand items, and badly made (with inferior components) items that were not quality checked. Givoe wanted to discuss giving us a credit against these faulty units off our next order. They said that they would refund 25% of the money but, because we had been so demanding in expectations, they needed to charge us 25% more on the next order! That's tight, they wanted to charge us the credit that we were to be “given” off our next order with them. Of course, when we said that we were not prepared to buy any more product from them until they refunded / reimbursed us, Givoe then went totally quiet; we never had any replies from them ever again.

We would never buy another K6000 car camera from anyone (not least as around 60% are handled by Givoe), nor will we ever buy anything ever gain from Shenzhen Givoe Technology Co., Ltd of Hong Kong and China.